


Bad Seed

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown
Genre: Angst, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, If You Squint - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internalized Homophobia, Love but also more agape? than eros?, M/M, Pining, Snapshots, Tactus is a Disaster, Unrequited Crush, Vignette, dermatilomania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 07:48:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12883347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: Tactus is not the golden boy—  the golden son.





	Bad Seed

**Author's Note:**

> written whilst really quite drunk and not having read the series in several months, and even then, only once. so, quality stuff as you can imagine.

It started out alright, really— life, that is.  

Born a gold, Tactus’ life ought to be just prime. It is, in most respects: most of the time he wants for nothing material, is taught all a boy could be taught (there are so many lessons to be learned, but for a moment he dares to doubt if they are teaching him the right ones). Privilege and splendor hang tight around his heels from long before he is old enough to know of their existence.

He is born into a world where that very world is dangled before his fingertips, and he is told that all of it, every inch, might one day be his. It is an attractive truth he swallows up along with breast milk and lazy sunshine. 

Nursemaids raise him, but they are well paid and kind. His father is not a kind man, not a  _ gentle  _ man, yet his greatest act of cruelty is born not of his oft-swelling rage, but of banal disinterest. He neglects to teach Tactus young that the promised world won't come easy. In his father’s place, his mother - well-meaning but misguided - sings her sons to sleep with promises of absolute inheritance. Slight limbs and blissful minds are rocked to sleep in ignorance, and for then at least, happiness is surplus.

But sleep is the land of children, and the first piece of the promised world that Tactus is to inherit is the passing of time. No one warns him what it was to grow up. No one warns him he’ll have to  _ do  _ to win that world.

 

* * *

 

 

No one ever tells Tactus outright that the killing is coming. It is drip fed to them all implicitly, through endless training regimes and lessons focused around how to snap a man’s neck just so. In the beginning, he is play pretending to be the heroes of his childhood's epics when he aims a gun, and shoots a bow, and wields a knife. Hit or miss, there’s laughter, and a ruffling of hair from his brother's close-by hand. 

He doesn’t know why that stops. There is no spoken realisation, not even a dawning narrative in the back of his own skull. It just so happens that one day he does not hit the mark and his stomach sinks. He knows, with a certainty that’s going to start proving rarer, that winning matters. There’s no laughter as he retrieves his arrows from the mud. It stains his hands brown, for now. He learns without being told that he must learn to stain them red, if he’s to stand a chance in his inheritance. 

Tharsus soon stops touching him like a brother. When their limbs meet, it is in acts of war. They fight and push, no smiles, no laughter. When one of them falls down upon the ground, the other does not relent until a face has been beaten bloody. Tactus is twelve the first time he loses consciousness. From that day on, he and his brother do not talk save for terse remarks; Insults from the elder, bitter mockings from the younger. 

Therein lies the first lesson: There is only one victor.

One inheritance.

And henceforth, all the world’s a competition, and all the men and women merely players (waiting to rip everything raw from his hands).

 

* * *

 

 

The second lesson is never told to him direct, thus he learns a more important one (people won’t always tell the truths right to your face. There’s listening to be done, and he’s never been very patient). 

It’s a bitter one. It’s hard to swallow, more so than the medicine they force-feed him for six months when he is ruined by a fever, more so than the dirt his brother forces down his throat in derision. It’s a simple one.

He learns: He isn’t very  _ good _ at things.

His brother is majestic on a battlefield. Each crack of his limbs can bring down a man twice his size. His father is the prized tactician of the prime fleet. It guts him to learn his mother is a better shot at him, not just by chance, but by miles; She hits the bullseye every time. He fumbles, keeps on missing, as if he’s still a child. Strategy for the long-term alludes him, turns his brain to fog and mystery. 

There’s a world out there promised to him, but rapidly he learns he doesn’t stand a chance of keeping it. 

Even that’s a pretense.  There’s not a hope in hell he’ll ever get it. 

‘Try harder,’ his father tells him, each and every time he fails. At first he listens, working long into the nights to perfect his skills the best he can. Yet he is quick to find that no matter how hard he doubles down on effort, he is always second-rate. Second best. And what is the point if he can't be number one? Who ever notices the second brightest star?

His brother dazzles at all parties. He is gorgeous where Tactus is rat-faced, charismatic where Tactus trips his words. Maybe he’s not so great, but from where Tactus watches from ground-zero, he seems mightier than any childhood hero. What lies forever two steps ahead of Tactus comes to brother dearest with the simplest ease, as intuitive to him as breathing.

He has talent.

Tactus has nothing of the sort.

So he learns, piece by piece, downfall by downfall, that he must excel at something he  _ can  _ choose, a thing in which he does not have to be born great. There is plenty to choose from - kindness, compassion, selflessness - but he intuits that only one choice will get him anywhere in the realm of golds. 

He chooses to be cruel.

And oh.  _ Oh _ . 

Oh, _ how he has found his calling.  _

 

* * *

 

 

He was wrong when he thought he had no talents.

He takes to cruelty like a duckling to water– shakes off his feathers and away he goes. He beats the servants for looking at him wrong. Cheats every other boy and girl in school until people avoid him in the corridors and whisper behind his back. ‘Mad dog’, they call him. A beast that will bite at anyone who comes too close. And once where they might have tittered at him, now they learn the feel of fear.

_ Good. _

Let them be afraid. He wants for nothing more, for fear - he has learned - brings about surrender. If others will surrender their everythings to him, then perhaps they will not see how sorely he is lacking. 

His hands are rubbed raw from picking at the flesh, a nervous habit he hides ashamed from his mother. ‘Oh son,’ she cooes each time she catches him, flaking, dripping crimson. ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’ 

Those hands, ugly as they are, have throttled people, torn out hair, clawed out one girl’s eyes. He hates them. He hates what his body has become. At least now, his outsides match his insides.

So he keeps on picking, and hopes the scars will last.

 

* * *

 

 

Cruelty comes hand in hand with blood-lust. He might hate it, loathe himself for every step he takes down that fucked up red-slicked rabbit hole, but his body is that of ancient animals. With every fight it longs harder and harder for the claiming of life, for the conquering of foes. He craves not only the world now, but power. He has learned the two come hand in hand. 

It starts by beating weaklings into pavements. Trickery and deceit are his forte, but use them enough and he can pretend there’s strength and speed in his limbs also. He lures those who would oppose him out into the darkness, alone and overconfident, and knocks their legs from under them with weapons they’ll deem ‘unfair’. Unfair doesn’t mean shit when they’ve lost an eye or limb or cock. Especially not if it’s the latter. 

He brings his first one home and leaves it in the bed of his fair brother. 

It is worth the pummeling he receives. 

For an instant, a shivering, shining instant, his perfect brother is afraid. Afraid of  _ him _ . (As he should be. Tactus is learning now, and no tutor taught them this playing field. He navigates it on his own. It is the elder’s turn to play catch up.)

 

* * *

 

 

Bloodlust brings with it a lust for something else. At first Tactus thinks it might be flesh, the lust of sexual appetites, the devouring of bodies not through teeth but through organs more external. As he has grown away from cruel father, ignorant mother, hateful brother, he pursues the task on his own. He would throw himself head first into the task, but there is just one problem: he is a coward.

He dallies about the subject too long, until he’s sixteen and there’s this girl. She’s a girl who takes him behind the curtains and pins him against cool windowpanes, rakes her fingers through his hair. She’s not that pretty and he’s not sure he likes her all that much, but she’s a body of flesh and bone and breasts, and he wants to wet his appetite. He lets her take him to the gardens and fuck him behind the bushes.

It is yet another area where he lacks talent. His limbs slip, his body trembles, and he knows she’s no virgin by how she laughs at him. Still, he can’t run away from this - try as he might with excuses - and so he has to circumnavigate his humiliation in search of some relief. She eases him into her, guides him with soft, patronising words to fuck her slowly. It takes too long for him to come, he’s so tense from the embarrassment. 

At least she is polite about it. She rebinds her hair and tucks herself back in, calls him ‘sweet boy’ and presses a kiss upon his forehead, as if she is his mother. She’s his age, but she’s centuries more worldly. No girl does that and fucks a boy again. He’s lost to her and knows it, but vows never again. If he can be cruel in matters of the battlefield, the school ground, then he is certain he can be coldcruel in bedrooms enough to cease their laughter.

Never again, he vows. 

 

* * *

 

Vowing is well and all, but naked bodies are only weapons in more competent hands. Every time, unclothed and panting, he is dismantled. This persona he has constructed, of cocky arrogance and leering, it melts in that hotbloodheat of arousal. Always, he wants only to please, to succeed, but in the bedroom things grow closer. There is but one he must satisfy, and how can he mistreat them?

He does not know where to place his hands. With cruelty off the table, he is left with nothing. He is the talentless second son with nothing to inherit, so what can he give them? If he is not perfect, what is the point? What is the lesson?

 

* * *

 

 

It is by drunken accident he discovers the tight-rough flesh and hands of men. Too many drinks, too much antipathy, and he is brooding in dark corners at his father’s party and muttering into goblets. A man, a snatching of years his senior, approaches and smiles at him like he matters. 

Tactus has always been weak to basic kindness. Especially when it graduates into outright flattery. 

He barely bothers to think himself risky when the other has him pushed up against his father’s bookshelves, claiming his mouth rough and hot and heavy. It is a mouth of plush lips and liquored breath, a kind of sinking organ that offers him a world of drowning. He pursues, delves deep into the oblivion of heavy kisses, aggression. It feels like fighting with his brother when they were younger, flipping and wrestling for dominance. 

For the first time, he gives in. 

Fear and adrenaline both relish as he bends himself over polished mahogany, begs for the other to strip him naked. There is no compliance. The stranger, at least twice as drunk as he, pulls down his pants and that is all they partake in exposure. There’s a rush, a what-if-some-fool-comes in kind of mania, and though they never voice it, they know it’s a real kind of threat. No one other can see this. 

He takes him from behind, after fingers and pocketed liquids have loosened him for the reaping. There’s nothing of dominance of his here, no winning or cruelty on Tactus’ behalf. All he does is lie and sprawl and whimper, gasping out for _ deeper _ . How he can want this, he does not know. It does not fit with the standards he has curated. Not because his partner is a man, but because, lo, he does surrender to him.

For a moment, hazy and steeped in booze, he isn’t monster cruel. He’s open and taking and praising this dishevelled gold before him. He’s pressed flush against old-time bound leather volumes and those words that speak of battle are listening in silence to his moans of degradation. He doesn’t want to win this battle. Let the others claim the prize, seize inheritance and bounty. He just wants a moment of retribution for all that he has done.  

The other comes and wipes him out, kisses his thighs, then leaves him. It’s sweet, almost. Tender. There was no laughter this time, no mocking of his senses. He crumbles to the floor and fears this new unwanted talent. 

What use is an affinity for suffering?

 

* * *

 

 

Step by step, he learns from the men who fuck him how to fuck girls. It’s a fucked up kind of learning, and he’s heard there’s another way, a romantic way, but he’s yet to find it amongst the throat-tearing realm of golds. He likes the way he can find boys and men capable of destroying him without uttering a word. The more he finds, the less he feels the urge to pick at his scab-scarred hands. They can scratch the itch far deeper, with a resonance that infiltrates his bones.

And once he knows how to take a body by the arse and fuck it, he goes to find the girl. 

It’s during the trial, the first of many that he’s been training for, and she has no power. He sees too much of himself in her, and wants to show her to bury that fear. She needs a mask, or an act, or cruelty. Something tough and unyielding to push back against all this that’s thrown against them to weed out the tender. 

He can’t recall if he ever felt that way. Soft, giving, merciful. Sure, there are memories of summers spent lounging in midge-infested lakes, splashing at his brother and thinking how much he loves this life, but it doesn’t feel like him. Or if it does, it’s a foolish recollection. He knew nothing then. Whole sections of the world were walled off from him, like how they treat the reds, how they beat their own kind, how to be peerless one must be scarred. 

He goes to the girl who trembles, and takes her by the hair. He has never been more ugly.

Someone has to teach her.

 

* * *

 

 

An unexpected lesson, from an unexpected person.

Darrow puts him on the ground and the whippings teach him nothing. Pain is no stranger to his knuckle-broken body. But it is when that whip is slipped between his fingers, and golden eyes burn into his with such a sense of duty he fears he might just cry, that he learns something terrible.

Is it respect? Fear? Loyalty? He doesn’t know, can’t name the turning in his stomach but it makes him sick and he wants out. Yet too many eyes are watching for him to run and cry to mother like he always wants to. He never asked for this. He just wanted the world to be served to him on a silver platter.

Raising the whip, he inhales, and strikes.

 

* * *

 

 

‘It’s okay,’ he tells himself, much later in woods and darkness. Nails blunted by weeks of scrapping fail to tear at his palms like they should do, so he has to dip and bite his fingers. With canines, like the Jackal, he rips his flesh from his bones and cries into another. Big body, big Pax, big idiot. But he’s promised not to say a word, even as Tactus loses his shit and breaks down sobbing.

What is the lesson?

It is not about him. It is about the golden sun who shone before him.

Darrow is something else, something _other_. A beacon of force and radiance, a drill that does not stop when it meets all resistance. He is everything Tactus failed to be. 

And he knows, even as he curses him, that he will follow him now forever. How can he not, when he is the first man to show him kindness? The first man to show him equal measures of firm and fair. He is the teacher his turmoil childhood was deprived of, the lesson no money or parent could ever give. 

He hates him, and to Tactus, that’s a bruising kind of love.

 

* * *

 

 

Victory, by razors, rebellion, monstrosities; This is a world in which Tactus can exist. To hide in corpses and burn for fury is exactly what he wants. Whatever uncertainty he might have tasted melts as victory draws in. Darrow is their hero. He is the leader of those childhood epics, of ancient Greece conquering seas and monsters, of valiant knights saving the lost and lonesome.

Tactus grins through it, but how did he become the maiden? The peasant? The curr? He is the filth beneath Darrow’s shoes, but for a while, the hero shines so bright he does not care, for what an honor it is to look upon that sunrise. 

Tactus will be the tool by which he rises. 

Tactus will be the knife for him to wield. 

Tactus shall be commanded, if only from the shadows.

No one else can dare find out.

 

* * *

 

 

Years melt. They call him ‘Pixie’. There’s drugs and sex and drugs again to drown it out. He might be a weapon, but he’s no commander. The world he was promised young remains escaped from him, and he should be bitter.

He’s not. Not for the loss of crestfallen expectations. He’s bitter for so much more.

There’s a god of gold who barely sees him. His personality is flawed and crude and all he knows is years of sharp smiles and deft vulgarity, so how is Tactus to endear himself to the sun? How can Darrow bear to look at him, these hands, this body that has done so much wrong? He cannot stand himself, so how can he ask it of a god? 

Mars himself would hate him, though war rages in every fibre of his body.

He just wants the world to end. He cannot long for what does not exist. Yet still he lies awake night after night planning and plotting ways to be noticed. To prove himself. To his father, to his brother, to Roque and his too-wise smiles, to Darrow and his distant guard. They underestimate him, not in talent, but in desperation. 

He was never meant to make it this far.

 

* * *

 

 

There are moments, however, of lightness. A kind of dance, held in the air by imaginary spider silk forming a web between smiles and laughter. Those people who call themselves his friends, they tell each other jokes, play talk and play pretend at things being so very normal, and in this, they will include him without a second thought. He has never been swept up like this. Always the outsider, always the mad dog.

Has the feral beast gone out of him? Does Darrow have him tamed?

His nails dig into palmflesh as he thinks it. But there the gold sun is, smiling at him, and requesting he play for them, a violin in hand.

He isn’t the best, hasn’t practiced enough. It’s too fast and he trips on notes and hurries through the climax, yet at the end they clap and Victra is there crying. Even Servo tells him a kind of half-compliment that wrecks his insides. He didn’t ask for this. He never wanted friendship.

He’s cruel. 

He was never built for kindness, not enough talents to afford it.

Clenching his fists, violin drooping in one hand, he resents them.

They’re draining all his power, and worst of all?

_ He likes it. _

 

* * *

 

As he betrays them, he thinks to himself: Do I want it?

Do I want what this will bring me?

The answer, of course, is no. It will bring him naught but scorn for being a rat-faced traitor. But then, he never did it for the bringing.

He does it for the leaving, the running.

They’re offering too much, and there’s a warmth within them that threatens quiet to bind him. They’ll tie him in and make him one of them, a man of smiles and softening declarations. He’ll be a warrior, maybe, but the cruelty he constructed will, piece by piece, by stripped from him.

And then when they leave him, and give their final lesson, how will he survive?

No. He won’t let them. He bites his lip, splits it. That blood, that salted burning, is all the comfort he can take. All else eludes him.

He swallows, and leaves them for the taking.


End file.
